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2023#

Using Google Earth for Golf

I'm going to diverge a small bit from the straight network automation space that I have blogged about primarily and dive a small bit into the world of using Google Earth to help prepare for your golf game. Upcoming, I'm playing in a Minnesota Golf event at two courses in late August. I'm going to put together a green book for myself and figure this would be a great topic to touch on how I'm going about this activity.

Workstation Troubleshooting 2023

In my previous post I wrote about a workstation that I was working on building. It took an incredibly long time to get up and into a stable environment. But I have finally accomplished stability (hoping to not jinx it here with the post). I went through a fair bit of troubleshooting to get to this point.

Desktop Build 2023

Here I'm going to dive into what I'm planning to build out for my next desktop here in 2023. Prime Day is nearly upon us, and I'm anticipating (but do not know for sure) that prices on some of the gear that I'm looking for will be available at a good price. I'm also looking to build out a bigger system in order to run some intense VMs up coming.

My goals: - Build a system that will last for 3-4 years at a minimum - Max out the RAM, that is my most limiting factor in my environments - Give Linux a try as the desktop OS, still a bit of debate in this, considering options: - Debian 12 - POP OS - Linux Mint

Nautobot: Get IP Addresses From Nautobot

One of Nautobot's primary functions is to serve as an IPAM solution. Within that realm, the application needs to provide a method to get at IP address data for a device, quickly and easily. In this post I will review three prominent methods to get an IP address from Nautobot. It will demonstrate getting the address via:

  • Nautobot REST API
  • curl
  • Python Requests
  • GoLang HTTP
  • pynautobot
  • Ansible Lookup
  • Nautobot GraphQL API
  • curl
  • Python Requests
  • GoLang HTTP
  • pynautobot
  • Ansible Lookup

Nautobot Remote Validation

In this post I'm going to dive into a bit more on the Nautobot custom validators. This is a powerful validation tool that will allow for you to write your own validation capability, including in this demonstration on how to complete a validation against a remote API endpoint. The custom validators are a part of the Nautobot App extension capability. This allows for custom code to be written to validate data upon the clean() method being called, which is used in the majority of API calls and form inputs of Nautobot.

Slack Canvas

Newly released (at some point anyway) is Slack Canvas, what looks to be a little bit of on demand wiki, collaboration space, and possibly (based on marketing materials) workflow organizer. This came to light as a "pop up" when I went into a Slack window on my mobile. Being a curious person and someone that is willing to try out new things I jumped right in.

Poetry Fix

The Python Poetry is our go to package management system thus far, you can see that in all of the Python projects that Network to Code open sources, such as Nautobot, pyntc, network-importer, and NTC-Templates. Lately though, I've been having some challenges when my HomeBrew updates happen and my system Python gets updated. I've been able to recover with the help of the same few pages I land on from my Google searches. But since I've done this twice now, I'm using this post to document the fix as much as for myself, but for anyone else that may come across Poetry issues.

Nautobot Secrets - Hashicorp Vault

With Nautobot, one of the things that came up was how to work with secrets. Nautobot itself is not the place to maintain secrets, as it is not a vault. There may be some good cryptographic libraries out to handle this, but by its nature, that is not the intent. So Nautobot has written methods to be able to retrieve secrets from proper vault sources and be able to leverage them. These can be tricky to get set up however. I had struggled for a while myself. So now that I have it working, I thought it would be a good time to have a quick personal blog about it.